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 Robotics / RCX / pbFORTH / 273
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Subject: 
Re: The pain of communicating with the RCX
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth
Date: 
Thu, 9 Mar 2000 20:00:52 GMT
Viewed: 
1422 times
  
In lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth, Ralph Hempel writes:
The power of Forth lies in the ease with which a system can be built and
Good. I'm glad your on-side so far :-)

Does that count as `tempted by the dark side' or `seen the light'? :)

1) How do you ship forth code as text to the RCX? Downloading an srec file
You are right. I have found that getting a reliable connection is very
dependent on ambient light, the voltage of the RCX batteries, and the tower • itself.
Try to use the tower in NEAR mode so that it does not swamp the RCX receiver.

I tried near and far mode, several distances, putting the tower and the RCX
under a dark cloth... Everything I could think of except putting 'em where
the sun don't shine:)

I'm trying to get my Tcl GUI back in order so that we can all have a common
base to work with. There are so many comm programs out there that it
is difficult to get them all working.

I couldn't find it on the pbforth website. What exactly does it do? Anything
we can do to help developing it?

2) How can I upload an augmented forth system from the RCX to my PC? I think
rx (=Receive X-Modem; from the lrzsz package) gets confused by the echo of
[...cut...]
then a little pause occurs, and the checksum is sent. I don't see any 0s to
fill the block to 128 bytes. Doing "0 emit" doesn't give me a 0 either. This
explains the timeout error, but not why a 0 isn't transmitted. Does the IR
tower eat them?

This I'm not too sure about. I'll have to look at what the source code
does. It is getting more difficult to find an XMODEM program for all
three platforms, which is another reason for getting the Tcl script back up.

Part of the problem seems to be the variety in X-Modem flavours. Most modern
programs aren't too fond of the real X-Modem protocol, and expect some
newer version of it.

[..on the IR tower...]
on the web (in particular Kekoa Proudfoot's page) seems to indicate that it
was designed to handle only a very restrictive query-answer protocol. This
would mean every (few) character(s) should be wrapped in an IR-tower packet
which is subsequently transmitted. This requires of course special software

Yes and no. The first time you hit CR on your terminal, you get garbage
back from the tower. If the comm program is waiting too long before
retrying, it will always get junk back as the first few chars.

Hmm. That's because of the warm-up time? I've never seen any garbage after
typing my first CR (empty line), so far; only after a line with contents. But
I don't know what the comm program does to initialize the port.
And rx is reporting `025 received' 10 times in a row before giving up. Garbage
consistently being a NAK is a bit suspicious to me.

Has anybody more information on this, or maybe even (the beginning of) a
solution?

Not yet, but so far developing under Windows has not been too bad.....
Ah, but I don't have Windows and I'm not going to install it. Not even for
pbforth's sake:-)

Ernst



Message has 1 Reply:
  RE: The pain of communicating with the RCX
 
(...) Depends on which side of the fence you are on... (...) Hmmm. This is not good. I have ghad very good success with CRT, but I'm going to try a more general solution with Tcl. (...) I stopped supporting it late last year because it only worked (...) (25 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)

Message is in Reply To:
  RE: The pain of communicating with the RCX
 
(...) Good. I'm glad your on-side so far :-) (...) You are right. I have found that getting a reliable connection is very dependent on ambient light, the voltage of the RCX batteries, and the tower itself. Try to use the tower in NEAR mode so that (...) (25 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)

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